Fox Talbot's Botanic Garden: W.H. Fox Talbot's early experiments with photography at Lacock Abbey were in part prompted by his passion for botany, as Katie Fretwell explains

Wlliam Henry Fox Talbot (1800-77) a brilliant man of many talents (Fig. 1) is best known as individual of the pioneers of photography, and, above all, for his invention of the calotype--or negative-positive--process in 1840 (1) What is les well known is that it was his interest in plants, and the search for an improved means of recording them, that l to his ground-breaking discovery. At his abode at Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire, he unraveled and stocked the Botanic Garden specifically in order to hunt his own studies. (2)

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Lacock Abbey, built as a monastery in the thirteenth century, survives largely intact despite several campaigns of alterations and additions. After the Abbey was stifleed in 1539, it was bought by dint of Sir William Sharington (1495?-1553), who created a formal garden of large courts around the southerly and east sides of the house which would have been best appreciated from the banqueting scope at the top of his of recent origin octagonal tower. A descendant of Sharington, John Ivory Talbot (d 1772) added a ha-ha, a formal canal and a terrace in the early eighteenth hundred In 1753, the amateur architect Sanderson Miller (1716-80) rebuilt the Great Hall and designed a Gothic archway for the carriage drive. Around the same time, Lancelot 'Capability' Brown (1716-83) was paid sum of two units hundred and fifty pounds, perhaps for creating a novel drive, moving the road further away, and laying without the paddock as a setting for the novel hall. Later in the eighteenth hundred the Reverend William Davenport continued the naturalisation of the landscape, removing the of advanced age formal garden to the north of the Abbey.

William Henry Fox Talbot, the grandson of the venerable Davenport, was born at Lacock in 1800 His father died pretty soon afterwards, and the family mov without and let the Abbey. It was not until 1827 that Fox Talbot get backed to live at Lacock, with his mother, Lady Elisabeth, her next to the first husband, Captain Feilding, and their sum of two units daughters.

From an early age Fox Talbot had been keenly interested in plants; he and a friend, CW Trevelyan, documented the local flora of their academy Harrow, precociously publishing The Flora and Fauna of Harrow in 1811 They continued to correspond upon plant matters after going up to university--Fox Talbot to Cambridge and Trevelyan to Oxford. As a lad Fox Talbot concentrated his studies upon mosses, probably inspired by Sir William Jackson Hooker's (1785-1865) discovery of the rare Buxbaumia aphylla. He corresponded with the leading botanists of the day, and described plants in Glamorganshire to Lewis Weston Dillwyn at the age of fourteen. Other correspondents included William Hooker who introduced him to the venerable James Dalton of Croft in Yorkshire, an dexterous on mosses and sedges. Dalton encouraged Fox Talbot to stretch out his studies to other plant clumps and he soon began gathering plant material upon travels abroad. By the age of twenty-nine, Fox Talbot was a valueed botanist and a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London. (3)

When the family mov back to the ancestral residence at Lacock, Fox Talbot took charge of the garden. Almost immediately he began setting up his possess Botanic Garden, taking over an of advanced age stone-walled enclosure, formerly the for the use of all or stable yard, next to the kitchen garden. Here John McPhail, the gardener, was at work trenching in 1828 to create beds for the already burgeoning plant collection. Later, greenhouses were added to widen the range of plants. Fox Talbot's careful and extensive notes present to view that he was recording plants, examining their make and applying taxonomic principles, as well as experimenting with horticultural and management techniques--for example, comparing modes of seed preparation, layering copsewood and soil-tilling. These activities took place side by dint of side with his researches upon chemicals and investigations into possible photographic techniques.

At first, Fox Talbot produc 'photogenic drawings'--made by the agency of exposing to the sun drawing paper coated in a solution of silver nitrate--as a means of recording muscle and fat plant material (Fig. 2). These experiments l him to evolve the calotype process, and the production, in 1835 of the first at any time negative, a picture of the Oriel window at Lacock. He went upon to make many further photographs of the garden, plants, local family and landscapes, developing a step of attention to artistic detail akin to painting of the time. (4) Unfortunately, he does not have the appearance to have purposely photographed his Botanic Garden, although it appears in the background of a picture of his children at play (Fig. 3)

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Fox Talbot pretty soon began acquiring plants from further afield. quite through his life he travelled a great deal, mainly in Europe visiting France, Germany, Italy and the Alps, everywhere listing and describing plants. In 1826 he had made a major botanical trip to the Ionian Islands not upon the west coast of Greece--to Corfu, Zante and Cefalonia--setting up a herbarium of Ionian plants, which are now held at Kew smooth his honeymoon to northern Italy in 1833 upon his marriage to Constance Mundy of Markeaton, Derbyshire, make go rounded into a botanising trip. Fox Talbot visited horticultural and botanic gardens abroad, similar as the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, whilst maintaining an interest in native British flora, recording plants around Lacock.